In this talk I will discuss some recently published papers that connect Ensemble Learning, Genetic Programming, Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) and Combinatorial Optimisation.

I will first describe two different ensemble methods for solving static JSSP problems and complex vehicle routing problems. The first method combines GP with an AIS framework to evolve a diverse set of new heuristics that when used with a greedy selection method, perform well on a very large set of JSSP instances. In the second method, GP is used to evolve a set of new constructive heuristics for VRP, which are then used to initialise a population operated on by a population based perturbative hyper-heuristic. The combined constructive-perturbative method outperforms known heuristics and recent ensemble methods. Finally, I will describe some recently published work in which we examine in depth how to construct an effective ensemble from a set of optimisers. Using bin-packing as an example domain, we show that in some cases "diversity trumps ability", raising some interesting issues for future ensemble design.

Biography: Emma Hart is a Professor at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland, where she leads the Centre for Algorithms, Visualisation and Evolving Systems. She gained a 1st Class Honours Degree in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, followed by an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh before moving to Edinburgh Napier University. Her PhD, also from the University of Edinburgh, explored the use of immunology as an inspiration for computing, examining a range of techniques applied to optimisation and data classification problems.

Her research focuses on Evolutionary Computing and Artificial Immune Systems, mainly in the domain of combinatorial optimisation. From January 2017, she has taken over as Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press). In 2016, she was General Chair of PPSN 2016, and has acted as a Track Chair at GECCO for several years. She has given keynotes at EURO 2016 and UKCI 2015, as well as invited talks and tutorials at many Universities and international conferences. She is an elected member of the ACM SIGEVO Executive Board and also edits the SIGEVO newsletter. She is currently a member of the UK Operations Research Society newly formed Research Panel.